She was denied legal counsel - not even provided a patient advocate - and was somehow expected to represent herself while in labor - while the hospital caring for her told her she was "a bad mother" in court??
Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
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Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#12I read the whole thing an hour ago and I'm still not through processing all of the pros and the cons but the thing that really stands out for me is the degradation and the lack of humanity. A hospital taking a patient to court is on a level that I can not square with the Hippocratic Oath. During COVID there were all these people talking about 'bodily autonomy' and I felt that was overblown, vaccines are one of the be…
Part of the problem is the courts. There are many laws now about protecting babies, in this case of they'd done nothing and mother and baby both died, they could be arrested for that.
Medical consent is a house that I consider holy but I draw the line at 'societal good'. This woman was at worst a risk to herself and the degree of violation here (besides the insults!) is revolting at so many levels. They had zero respect or consideration for her, their paper reality appears to have been more important to them than the flesh and blood human that trusted them enough to put herself in their power. And then they proceeded to grossly violate that trust. This is 'Terry Schiavo' in reverse, another case that had me wondering why people don't have respect for other people and allow them some dignity. There the courts were required to allow the hospital to stop a treatment they knew would never result in a patient recovering or even improving, and yet the parents tried to use the courts to force the hospital to continue to keep her alive against the wishes of the husband and the hospital.
And that took 15 years...
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#13She was denied legal counsel - not even provided a patient advocate - and was somehow expected to represent herself while in labor - while the hospital caring for her told her she was "a bad mother" in court??
I also needed to reread that paragraph a few times but it seems a law professor was commenting on the case with an expression of what the hospital could have been thinking, not that anyone actually said anything about being a bad mother.
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#14Please consider using the Donate link at the bottom of the article to support good, independent investigative journalism!
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#15Perhaps we need a quantitative scoring model of whether a C-section is warranted. Obviously her "score" wasn't sufficiently high until the baby's heart rate actually dropped. In other words, a C-section shouldn't have been pushed on her until there was strong evidence, i.e. the low heart rate, and not merely suggestive evidence, to warrant it.
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#16WTF? This is shameful. It’s also why I feel vaccine mandates shouldn’t be legal. We all have a fundamental right to our bodies. The government shouldn’t be able to force you to make different choices when it comes to your body.
Yes, that's precisely the thing I'm struggling with because I think vaccine mandates should be legal: it's everybody's lives at stake. But I recognize the conflict and the inconsistency.
Pregnancy isn’t contagious and C-sections do not serve as a way to slow or stop the spread of it to people that do not want it. It is one of those things that’s only hard to reconcile if the starting premise is that everything that can be expressed through words is equivalent.
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's precisely the thing I'm struggling with because I think vaccine mandates should be legal: it's everybody's lives at stake. But I recognize the conflict and the inconsistency.
Pregnancy isn’t contagious and C-sections do not serve as a way to slow or stop the spread of it to people that do not want it. It is one of those things that’s only hard to reconcile if the starting premise is that everything that can be expressed through words is equivalent.
That's obvious. But it is apparently not so obvious that there were people that felt the need to go to court over this and I recognize that if you enshrine bodily autonomy at one level you are going to have to argue much harder to achieve the reverse on another when it is the collective health that is at risk.
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pregnancy isn’t contagious and C-sections do not serve as a way to slow or stop the spread of it to people that do not want it. It is one of those things that’s only hard to reconcile if the starting premise is that everything that can be expressed through words is equivalent.
That's obvious. But it is apparently not so obvious that there were people that felt the need to go to court over this and I recognize that if you enshrine bodily autonomy at one level you are going to have to argue much harder to achieve the reverse on another when it is the collective health that is at risk.
Then where is the conflict and inconsistency?
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#19Perhaps we need a quantitative scoring model of whether a C-section is warranted. Obviously her "score" wasn't sufficiently high until the baby's heart rate actually dropped. In other words, a C-section shouldn't have been pushed on her until there was strong evidence, i.e. the low heart rate, and not merely suggestive evidence, to warrant it.
That quantitative score was there all along, they just took a short-cut through the courts. But you should be able to trust your medical services people to have your interests at heart first and foremost and that's where this went off the rails. This effectively prioritized the baby's health over hers, and that was her call to make, not the hospital.
Re: Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's obvious. But it is apparently not so obvious that there were people that felt the need to go to court over this and I recognize that if you enshrine bodily autonomy at one level you are going to have to argue much harder to achieve the reverse on another when it is the collective health that is at risk.
Then where is the conflict and inconsistency?
In the fact that depending on the person they will prioritize the one over the other, and may not be able to hold the two conflicting thoughts of 'my body' vs 'society's interests in our collective health' in their heads at the same time. It took me an hour or so to figure out exactly where I would draw the line, it is non-obvious to me (it is possible that I'm simply stupid but this is the kind of thing where I think snap judgments and knee jerk responses may lead to accidents).
FWIW COVID almost killed me and the vaccine came much too late, in spite of that I still had absolutely no problem getting the vaccine simply because it's a solidarity thing. Just like you're not going to go to work whilst you're contagious and so on. But I recall a lot of pointy conversations with others around that time and NL is a country where the anti-vaxx movement gained considerable ground through the way they managed to politicize (and weaponize) the skepticism around the vaccine. We have a political party here that is a very small fraction of the electorate that you could equate with the MAGA faction (or should I say republicans?) in the USA, who owe most of their votes to that era.
But if not for that vaccine I think the world would look quite a bit different today. So for collective situations I'm fine with some level of force (and to the best of my knowledge nobody actually got forced), just like we have rules for lots of other stuff. But in individual cases where the only person that is at risk of harm is the patient and absolutely nobody else the autonomy should (easily) triumph. I really don't understand what drove these medical professionals but if I had been the woman (and I'm not even a woman) I would have definitely filed a complaint with a medical ethics board about this whole thing. This should have never ever happened.